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Former Torture Memo Writer Says Some Liberties Must be Sacrificed
Tara Godvin
Associated Press
August 7, 2006
HONOLULU (AP) - John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft memos on treatment of terrorist prisoners, said Monday that in wartime, the question is not whether to give up liberties but "how much is enough."
Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, drew attention at an American Bar Association convention panel on whether tactics such as the detention of suspected terrorists at GuantanamoBay and the surveillance of phone calls may erode liberties.
Unlike past conflicts, the United States isn't at war with any traditional nation state, Yoo said, but is at war with the al-Qaida terrorist network, and officials are trying to adapt the rules of war to these new circumstances.
War, for example, involves targeted killings of the enemy and detentions of enemy troops until the end of a conflict, he said.
"I don't think it's a question of ... are we going to have to restrict civil liberties. It's a question of how much is enough," Yoo said.
Both World War II, with its detention of Japanese-American citizens, and the Civil War, with its mass military detentions, put serious restrictions on civil liberties that were much greater than what is happening today, Yoo said.
At Justice, Yoo helped write internal memos in 2002 designed to give the federal government greater leeway to aggressively question terror suspects.
Yoo noted in an interview after the panel that of the roughly one million prisoners of war held in World War II, none received a hearing or were charged with crimes, and some where held for five years.
"We never have hearings for prisoners of war, never have had them until this last year. It's just the way the rules of war have always been," he said.
Superimposing the rules of criminal law on war, such as requiring that a prisoner be read his Miranda rights, may be unwise, Yoo said.
"In wartime when you're detained, you're not being punished for anything. You're being held so you can't keep fighting," he said
However, panel member Neal Sonnett, a former prosecutor living in Miami, said calling the struggle against terrorism a "war" carries unnerving implications, including the indefinite duration of the conflict and increased presidential authority.
"If the president has greater powers in the time of a war that the president himself has told us is never going to end, I begin to worry about what's going to happen to civil liberties and constitutional rights in this country," said Sonnett, who is also chairman of the ABA's task force on enemy combatants.
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